Oh! let him go back to her!—wrestle with her, open his heart again, try new ways, make new concessions. How faint the sense of her trial has been growing within him of late! hers which had once been more terrible to him than his own! He feels the special temptations of his own nature; he throws himself, humbled, convicted, at her feet. The woman, the scene he has left, is effaced, blotted out by the natural intense reaction of remorseful love.
So he sped homewards at last through the noise of Oxford Street, seeing, hearing nothing. He opened his own door, and let himself into the dim, silent house. How the moment recalled to him that other supreme moment of his life at Murewell! No light in the drawing-room. He went upstairs and softly turned the handle of her room.
Inside the room seemed to him nearly dark. But the window was wide open. The free loosely-growing branches of the plane trees made a dark, delicate network against the luminous blue of the night. A cool air came to him laden with an almost rural scent of earth and leaves. By the window sat a white motionless figure. As he closed the door it rose and walked towards him without a word. Instinctively Robert felt that something unknown to him had been passing here. He paused breathless, expectant.
She came to him. She linked her cold trembling fingers round his neck.
'Robert, I have been waiting so long—it was so late! I thought'—and she choked down a sob—'perhaps something has happened to him, we are separated for ever, and I shall never be able to tell him. Robert, Mr. Flaxman talked to me; he opened my eyes; I have been so cruel to you, so hard! I have broken my vow. I don't deserve it; but—Robert!——'
She had spoken with extraordinary self-command till the last word, which fell into a smothered cry for pardon. Catherine Elsmere had very little of the soft clingingness which makes the charm of a certain type of woman. Each phrase she had spoken had seemed to take with it a piece of her life. She trembled and tottered in her husband's arms.
He bent over her with half-articulate words of amazement, of passion. He led her to her chair, and, kneeling before her, he tried, so far as the emotion of both would let him, to make her realise what was in his own heart, the penitence and longing which had winged his return to her. Without a mention of Madame de Netteville's name, indeed! That horror she should never know. But it was to it, as he held his wife, he owed his poignant sense of something half-jeopardised and wholly recovered; it was that consciousness in the background of his mind, ignorant of it as Catherine was then and always, which gave the peculiar epoch-making force to this sacred and critical hour of their lives. But she would hear nothing of his self-blame—nothing. She put her hand across his lips.
'I have seen things as they are, Robert,' she said very simply; 'while I have been sitting here, and downstairs, after Mr. Flaxman left me. You were right—I would not understand. And, in a sense, I shall never understand. I cannot change,' and her voice broke into piteousness. 'My Lord is my Lord always; but He is yours too. Oh, I know it, say what you will! That is what has been hidden from me; that is what my trouble has taught me; the powerlessness, the worthlessness, of words. It is the spirit that quickeneth. I should never have felt it so, but for this fiery furnace of pain. But I have been wandering in strange places, through strange thoughts. God has not one language, but many. I have dared to think He had but one, the one I knew. I have dared'—and she faltered—'to condemn your faith as no faith. Oh! I lay there so long in the dark downstairs, seeing you by that bed; I heard your voice, I crept to your side. Jesus was there, too. Ah, He was—He was! Leave me that comfort! What are you saying? Wrong—you? Unkind? Your wife knows nothing of it. Oh, did you think when you came in just now before dinner that I didn't care, that I had a heart of stone? Did you think I had broken my solemn promise, my vow to you that day at Murewell? So I have, a hundred times over. I made it in ignorance; I had not counted the cost—how could I? It was all so new, so strange. I dare not make it again, the will is so weak, circumstances so strong. But oh! take me back into your life! Hold me there! Remind me always of this night; convict me out of my own mouth! But I will learn my lesson; I will learn to hear the two voices, the voice that speaks to you and the voice that speaks to me—I must. It is all plain to me now. It has been appointed me.'
Then she broke down into a kind of weariness, and fell back in her chair, her delicate fingers straying with soft childish touch over his hair.